1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to telecommunications, and in particular, to resilient application design for communication services.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern communication providers often times offer a wide variety of communications services to customers. For example, customers frequently purchase, subscribe to, or otherwise obtain voice calling, ring tone, text messaging, or Internet access services from communication providers.
As communication services have advanced, the ability for service providers to rapidly create and implement new services has also increased. In addition, the complexity of many services has increased. The rapid rate at which service providers desire to create and implement new services sometimes conflicts with the complexity of a new service.
Often times, a service utilizes service applications in order to deliver the service. It is common that service applications are provided by or on service resources, such as physical computing platforms. Typically, resources are assigned to service applications manually during the design process.
In many cases, service applications are assigned a class from a selection of classes in a range. For example, a service application could be rated one of most critical, very critical, average criticality, or less critical. In the prior art, the classes are defined in terms of a high level relationship between the application being classified and the significance of the application to the service or organization as a whole. Examples of class definitions include the general importance of an application to a network or a service, the function of the application or location of the function in a service path, and the business impact if the application were to fail.
In the past, a design profile would be generated and displayed for the service application based on the classification assigned to the application by design personnel. The design profile typically describes various implementation details that would be required of an application in a particular class, such as typical hardware, data center, application failover, and data recovery requirements.
Unfortunately, this approach often times results in applications having classifications that are inaccurate because the classification step is based on high level class definitions. The class definitions are not granular enough to assist the design personnel with determining a truly accurate application classification. As a result, design profiles are frequently detached from what is actually or optimally needed for any particular service application. When implemented, a service risks increased errors and problems if the design profiles supporting the service are not accurate.